[Peace-discuss] Hawaii to Iraq

[Robert Naiman]

No, I think if you watch the DN interview, you'll find that this is
not correct, unless you think that doing the bidding of multinationals
constitutes "efforts to do good." I don't think Kinzer thinks this.

This is not to say that I am holding him up as a moral or political
exemplar. The very notion that there is a US national interest that
one could get right or wrong is of course inherently suspect. I think
Kinzer is worth reading and noting not because he is a hero of the
Revolution, but because as former NYT foreign correspondent, when he
says what we all know, and carefully documents it, it's a big deal.

On 4/22/06, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> Exactly right.  Kinzer's position seems similar to that of the
> left-liberal extreme of respectable opinion regarding Vietnam,
> e.g., Anthony Lewis in the NYT in 1969, that the war had begun
> with "blundering efforts to do good" but had become a
> "disaster" -- at a time when 70% of the public regarded it as
> "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not "a mistake." --CGE
>
>
> David Green wrote:
>
> > I think that Kinzer does a great service, but I would
> > have at least one concern. From the portions of the
> > interview yesterday on DN that I saw, he seems to be
> > saying that--for example--if only we hadn't overthrown
> > Mossadegh in 1953, we would have had a liberal
> > democracy in Iran all these years, and wouldn't the
> > whole Middle East look different, implying that our
> > leaders would be happy with that. Well, yes it would,
> > and no they wouldn't, and that's exactly why we
> > wouldn't allow that to happen. Kinzer still subscribes
> > (I think) to the "good intentions gone wrong" version
> > of history, rather than imperial intentions done well,
> > if messily, with too many dead bodies left behind. We
> > put a lot of effort into making sure that Arab
> > nationalism could not set a bad example for the Middle
> > East--in Iraq in 1958, in Egypt in 1967, etc. We put a
> > lot of effort into making sure that Saudi Arabia does
> > not become democratic, or Kuwiat, for that matter.
> >
> > David Green
>
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--
RN